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Just to keep adding to the pile... Anet Employee: " lets make a mage class where they use 4 elements, are the jack of all trades, and have the lowest inherent defenses that can only be used effectively when comboing all the elements together. But heres the kicker, lets only allow them to spec into 1-2 of the elements at a time so the majority of the skills are useless."

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@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@"ScottBroChill.3254" said:lets only allow them to spec into 1-2 of the elements at a time so the majority of the skills are useless."

Isn't it a bit of an overstatement? Surely, specing some element make it quite better, but not that much to call a non-specced element "useless".

It's literally not an overstatement. Water is useless if not specced for it, earth has some decent defensive options but generally you wont bother with them because it will cut too hard into your rigid dps rotation, And the elemental traits are so condition focused that they don't help the other 3/4ths of the build you are forced to take. And to be honest, if you're running elementalist then you are taking arcane+elite spec because those are the only two traitlines that give you universal benefits to your build. After that you generally take water because its incredibly strong on heals, but then damage suffers immensly, or you take air or fire, but then all your defensive options become moot because the sustain sucks from not taking water traits. So then, youre stuck in air and fire, and earth and water still hit like wet noodles and provide very little utility besides stringing together some mild forms of cc in hopes of survival. Generally, every build dances around 2 elements ignoring the other two because it would mess up the very delicate dps rotation of elementalist. The second they break from this cycle and switch to the other two elements, you see a large dps decrease and a very small survival increase. And if you don't spec for damage, then your just a sustain bunker who in the end doesnt provide anything to the team.

I stand by my statement. Ele can still perform, but its held back design wise and balance wise from its, in my opinon, stupid class mechanic that doesn't coincide with the rest of the games balance and would require its own selection of stats, seperate from what others can take, in order to balanced around them. What I mean by this is that they require the old celestial stats from before for its builds and design to work, but those stats become really overpowered when trying to balance them with the rest of the stats and builds available.

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@ScottBroChill.3254 said:

@ScottBroChill.3254 said:lets only allow them to spec into 1-2 of the elements at a time so the majority of the skills are useless."

Isn't it a bit of an overstatement? Surely, specing some element make it quite better, but not that much to call a non-specced element "useless".

It's literally not an overstatement. Water is useless if not specced for it, earth has some decent defensive options but generally you wont bother with them because it will cut too hard into your rigid dps rotation, And the elemental traits are so condition focused that they don't help the other 3/4ths of the build you are forced to take. And to be honest, if you're running elementalist then you are taking arcane+elite spec because those are the only two traitlines that give you universal benefits to your build. After that you generally take water because its incredibly strong on heals, but then damage suffers immensly, or you take air or fire, but then all your defensive options become moot because the sustain sucks from not taking water traits. So then, youre stuck in air and fire, and earth and water still hit like wet noodles and provide very little utility besides stringing together some mild forms of cc in hopes of survival. Generally, every build dances around 2 elements ignoring the other two because it would mess up the very delicate dps rotation of elementalist. The second they break from this cycle and switch to the other two elements, you see a large dps decrease and a very small survival increase. And if you don't spec for damage, then your just a sustain bunker who in the end doesnt provide anything to the team.

I stand by my statement. Ele can still perform, but its held back design wise and balance wise from its, in my opinon, stupid class mechanic that doesn't coincide with the rest of the games balance and would require its own selection of stats, seperate from what others can take, in order to balanced around them. What I mean by this is that they require the old celestial stats from before for its builds and design to work, but those stats become really overpowered when trying to balance them with the rest of the stats and builds available.

Exactly this. In order for ele to function, traits in fire, air, water and earth need to provide bonuses regardless of current attunement (with eventually increased bonus in traited attunement), more variety of traits (not focused 90% on damage or 90% on sustain, but in a slightly different way) and more reliable boon generation (aka something that doesn't require camping attunements or depends on rng).

Also update aura traits, they are so weak on top of already weak auras and low aura generation on core ele. Fire one was great design - defensive mechanic in offensive spec, more variety is always good.

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Suggestion:

  • Make attunement swap traits a core mechanic of elementalists (in base game traits, Fire/Water/Earth/Air/Arcane)
  • Reduce base damage/heal/duration of attunement swap effects by 50%
  • Replace current attunement swap traits with a 100% boost of the core mechanic

Example:

  • Water always heals the base amount, but with water traits it heals 100% more (Healing Ripple)
  • Fire swap always damages nearby foes and creates an aura, but with fire traits it will be 100% more damage/duration (Sunspot)
  • Air always causes a bolt of lightning, but with air traits it will deal 100% more damage (Electric Dicharge)
  • Earth always cripples and damage nearby foes, but with earth traits it will be 100% longer duration/damage (Earthen Blast)
  • Arcane always provides a self-boon at base duration, but with arcane traits it will be AoE and 100% longer duration (Elemental Attunement)

This will help achieving:

  • Getting at least 50% of an attunement's swap effect even if you didn't spec the specific trait line
  • More build flexibility because some of these trait lines will be less of a requirement and allow more room for experimenting with less popular trait lines

I've been a long time Elementalist player since GW1 (E/Me) and also Ele in GW2 since the first day back in 2012, good times.

The elementalist used to be a nuking class, just like sorcerers/mages in other games, and I believe it has been reduced to a wet-noodle-damage bunker in sPvP because the high damage variants are not actually viable in higher tiers of sPvP play (although I can have a good time in unranked), unlike GW1 or other PvP games where the mage classes do just fine on the damage department, even in higher levels of PvP. While this suggestion does not aggressively push damage numbers to the top or asks for damage buffs on nuking skills, I believe it improves the overall state of elementalist by allowing a little more variance in trait lines and opens up the way to experimenting with different element traits in sPvP.

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Ele was made needlessly complex in an effort to make it "unique" and create "scaling difficulty" for professions instead. "Balance" against other professions was not the main thought process behind certain designs, although the devs knew more straight forward, and simpler designs, also required skill to compete at higher levels (see below)... but they went a different route...

"Tap: Based on the progression of the class reveals, it’s apparent the difficulty has begun to scale, with the latest classes being the most complex. Is it fair to say that some classes will be easy to master and some difficult, or is this assessment too simple? Was it always ArenaNet’s intention to have some classes seen as ‘easy’ and some ‘difficult?’

Jon P: The average complexity for professions is going up. Elementalists, for example, are relatively easy to master – or, rather, they’re easy to learn – but there is a lot of depth to them as well. Though some of this comes down to the utility skills you are picking.

We said the engineer is very complex because his complexity limit is very high, but you could run an engineer with simpler utility skills and fewer kits which would make it a relatively straightforward class. There would still be a lot of decision making, but it is true that some classes are intended to be a little more straightforward.We often get people saying “As a warrior, all I do is build up my adrenaline and hit stuff,” when there is actually a lot involved in what you’re doing. The warrior is intended to be a profession that you can look at and understand, whereas with the guardian you’re actively managing when you can be in and out of battle in a much more complex way, because you actually have to make decisions to keep yourself safe. The warrior’s decisions are more damage and control and less support, so he is making fewer survivability decisions. That’s one of the key elements to what makes a profession easy to play; how survivable it is.

A player that doesn’t know what they are doing — who is only hitting random skills — as long as that profession can keep them alive long enough to kill the creature they are fighting, that is naturally an easier profession. For example, the thief can’t really use random skills as much as the warrior, but in some respects has more survivability than the warrior once you know what you’re doing. On the flip side, the complexity of the warrior is in a different place. Maybe not as important in PVE, but more important in PVP. To some extent it depends on what part of the game you are playing."

"Gigashadow (GW2G): The warrior seems an easy profession to get into, with a high skill floor and a very simple profession mechanic, and this has some people concerned. Can you assuage these fears by talking about some things which make the warrior very challenging to play and give it a high skill cap?

Jon P: The warrior’s strength is mainly focused on its melee attacks, but knowing where to be on the battlefield, at a high level, is probably the most difficult thing. To get to a very acceptable, competent level with the warrior, yes, it’s probably the easiest one to get there. But only one in a million people have reached the level of a warrior that really sets them apart. If you’ve seen any Guild Wars 1 we had The Last Pride, a Korean guild, and they had a warrior called Last of Master and there is no one I have seen who is even close to him. He takes positioning — the thing that makes a warrior — to a level no one else does."

Long story short... "Unique" and "scaling difficulty" was more important than balance, and that's why there are major issues when it come to wvw and spvp.

And this video sums up the Ele design, and the state of some other profession designs too...

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What I can say ..... trololololo ... playing elementalist it's kind of new game. You have many kinds of simluators. Simulator of farmining, simulator of goat and soo on. So here you have simulator of elemantalist which you can rename "simluator of dying". And what you can say at the end of your "adventure" with elementalist - trololololo. And of course some other few words... depence of your native language. This is the only solution because noone, absolutly noone from ANET, Devs, UFO, E.T. etc... enter and try to read in this forum.

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I believe i read the entire thread, but i don't remember seeing anything like this, so here goes...

I'd like to see the the trait lines completely changed from "choose which element you buff" to "choose which role you want to play"we could have one trait line for aoe bursts, conditions and soft CC, one for high damage on single targets and ways to disabling them, one for defense/tanking/sustainability, and one for support, healing and overall sharing with allies.The current traits allow to choose these roles, but they are also tied to their elements, so the overall damage boost we get from fire traits are available only with fire skills, making use of the other attunements strictly situational, for example.the arcane trait line could be tweaked to be more centered about the core gameplay mechanics, as it has already been proposed, by getting all the utility enhancing traits in this line.

Since any ele is able to swap to any element at will, i feel like having to invest in specific elements seems redundant and stupid, from a design point of view.Choosing which kind of role you want to play seems to me more what an ele should be able to do.And it would be more interesting when choosing an elite spec too, since these specs modify the gameplay.

I suppose this would bring the oh so abhorrent (un)holy trinity to the class, but being able to do just a little of everything makes the ele too irrelevant in my opinion.this comes from someone who plays almost only elementalist on PvE, even though i have a lvl80 toon for each class.

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@"Dahir.4158" said:

@"MyPuppy.8970" said:You know, it takes some time to implement all the good ideas we suggested.

Does it also "take some time" to write a few words to explain what is going on?

Apparently. There's no time to waste. Ele really needs it. I bet they don't even sleep.

Or maybe they forgot about this thread.

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@"Warobaz.9543" said:I believe i read the entire thread, but i don't remember seeing anything like this, so here goes...

I'd like to see the the trait lines completely changed from "choose which element you buff" to "choose which role you want to play"we could have one trait line for aoe bursts, conditions and soft CC, one for high damage on single targets and ways to disabling them, one for defense/tanking/sustainability, and one for support, healing and overall sharing with allies.The current traits allow to choose these roles, but they are also tied to their elements, so the overall damage boost we get from fire traits are available only with fire skills, making use of the other attunements strictly situational, for example.the arcane trait line could be tweaked to be more centered about the core gameplay mechanics, as it has already been proposed, by getting all the utility enhancing traits in this line.

Since any ele is able to swap to any element at will, i feel like having to invest in specific elements seems redundant and stupid, from a design point of view.Choosing which kind of role you want to play seems to me more what an ele should be able to do.And it would be more interesting when choosing an elite spec too, since these specs modify the gameplay.

I suppose this would bring the oh so abhorrent (un)holy trinity to the class, but being able to do just a little of everything makes the ele too irrelevant in my opinion.this comes from someone who plays almost only elementalist on PvE, even though i have a lvl80 toon for each class.

There has been similar suggestions, but not in identical format. Being able to improve specific attunement and its skills is good, but benefiting from traits while being attuned only to that element is not, especially because base values are quite low to begin with. If there were more global traits, ele would be much more balanced and interesting to play.

Think of it this way - specializing into fire should improve your offensive capabilities in both damage and support regardless of current attunement, but it should also add a bit of spice to fire related skills. Currently we only have the second option which means that our damage output is quite low without fire spec due to low base damage and huge reliance on damage modifiers.

Another option is to improve even other attunement skills (another fire spec example) : trait that procs might/burn every time you chill, daze, cripple or blind an enemy. That's definition of mastering elements for me, not what we have currently.

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@"Clownmug.8357" said:I saw in today's patch notes that new profession descriptions were created. Unfortunately, I don't have an open character slot to check and the wiki hasn't been updated. Could someone kindly provide a brief summary for me?

Update: Here are the descriptions for anyone interested.

Warrior
Favors Melee • High Survivability • WeaponsmasterWarriors build their adrenaline by successfully striking an enemy, then expend it to unleash devastating burst attacks. Warriors are versatile and resilient fighters.

Thief
Favors Melee • Stealth and Evasion • Acrobatic CombatThieves manage their initiative during combat, expending it to unleash carefully timed attacks. What they lack in defense, they make up for with skills to debilitate, teleport, or vanish from sight.

Guardian
Favors Melee • Supports Allies • Defensive MagicGuardians gain powerful personal enhancements from their virtues, which they can briefly expend to aid friends or damage foes. Formidable on their own, guardians shine brightest in the company of allies.

Mesmer
Favors Ranged • Creates Illusions • Finesse and MisdirectionMasters of magical misdirection, mesmers create and shatter clones and illusions of themselves in battle. Mesmers rely on evasion and subterfuge requiring finesse and practice to perfect.

Elementalist
Favors Ranged • Elemental Magic • Versatile CasterElementalists harness the power of the four elements—water, earth, fire, and air—to cast powerful spells. Their ability to change their elemental attunement midcombat is versatile but difficult to master.

Ranger
Favors Ranged • Pet Companion • NaturalistRangers tame a variety of pet companions to complement their fighting style. Rounding out their arsenal with traps, nature spirits, and survival skills, they have the tools to take on any type of foe.

Necromancer
Favors Ranged • Summons Minions • Dark MagicNecromancers of Tyria are monsters on the battlefield, draining life force from their enemies and entering a death shroud that temporarily grants them powerful abilities and protects them from harm.

Engineer
Melee or Ranged • Gadgets, Turrets, and Toolkits • TechnomancerEngineers are jacks-of-all-trades and, with enough time, masters of many. Able to bring dozens of abilities and toolbelt skills to a fight, their art is in choosing the right one to utilize at the perfect time.

Revenant
Melee or Ranged • Invokes Legendary Heroes • Magic-Wielding FighterRevenants invoke the power of legendary heroes from Tyria's past, spending their own energy to channel the abilities used by those figures. They are reliable allies and dangerous enemies.

(Not aimed at you at all Clownmug just wanted to give you credit for posting it on the forms thank you.)

So i guess this is a thing i am at a lost what casting a spell is in gw2 and what is defin as a powerful spell in that. Why is atument swapping called Versatile Caster but wepon swap is not. What is earth magic in gw2 because it dose not seem to be magic at all and over all most of the "spell" are just reskin animations with nearly the same effects from atument to atument.

I guess at least jacks-of-all-trades burden is gone from ele mind set lets hope its balances with out it in mind.

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@"MoriMoriMori.5349" said:I'm actually more afraid that they will indeed decide to do some radical changes. And will turn ele in some face-rolling, mundane as a nail profession, like most of others atm. Anet, just a few touches here and there, some buffs, some traits rearranging is enough. No need for anything radical, pls.

I am sorry but no, I think ele does need a drastic change. You can't make a profession that does a little bit of everything while forcing them to be super specialized in a single attunement and having others classes with more defined roles. An elementalist that does a little bit of everything will never replace a druid in a group. And when you already have a druid, why would you want a tiny bit more healing from the elementalist? That's why we need to be specialized. Attunements shouldn't do different things from one another. Our build should define what we do, and attunements should give us different tools to do this. If we specialize in DPS, all attunements need to help us to achieve that in some way. Our fire trait line shouldn't just improve fire, it should give offensive capabilities to all atunements, pushing us to rotate between all of them in order to maximize our DPS or react to different situations. An easyer way to do that would be to have "base" roles to each attunement, making all of them useful in specific situations: Water would condi cleanse and provide some personnal healing, earth would focus on combo finishers, fire on raw damage and air on targetted disables. Then, the traitlines we take should add to this: For example, taking a specific talent in the fire traitline may deal a flame burst around you every time you cleanse a condition or heal 1k health on yourself, making it worth it to swap to water in a DPS build if the situation requires it. That was just an idea and it's clearly not perfect, but that is what I think we should move towards.

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@ROMANG.1903 said:I am sorry but no, I think ele does need a drastic change. You can't make a profession that does a little bit of everything while forcing them to be super specialized in a single attunement and having others classes with more defined roles. An elementalist that does a little bit of everything will never replace a druid in a group. And when you already have a druid, why would you want a tiny bit more healing from the elementalist?

Mb because druid can mess it up/occur to be not very well familiar with how to play druid/too drunk or lazy/just get affected by a network lag and screw it up? Why is it bad to have a back up healer which can also bring in a lot of punch potential? That niche role works quite well for Zenyatta and Lucio in Overwatch, for example. Also, must note that what I'll be saying below is said from a perspective of someone who plays Openworld PvE mostly, and uses d/d as weapons exclusively (for the life of mine I couldn't make myself to like staff or scepeter/focus, they seem so dull and slow, and "laggy" when compared to d/d mobility and thrill of jumping into close combat and wrecking havoc with Churning earth and Air and FGS :) )

Yes, you can object, saying that in an ideal group there will always be most qualified people that train day and night together and can be 100% sure about their performance as a collective - but what percentage of the real in-game "group adventures" does those done by close to ideal groups who got their hands on a specialized and highly-trained druid in all their runs does constitute? Note I'm using a general term "group adventures" here which includes (but is not limited to) any kind of ad-hoc collective escapade, from some randomly assembled party of strangers roaming maps in open world pve to low-level raids and fractals to casual roams in WvW by some guld members who don't specialize in it. I have strong suspicion your argument will only stand for niche hard-core communities constituting a very small percentage of GW2 players, and most of groups could still will benefit from a backup healer. I personally use Water a lot in open-world pve, both for self-sustain (to heal myself in a battle which took too long for me to burn through my HP to a threatening levels) and to assist people who happened to be around.

@ROMANG.1903 said:That's why we need to be specialized. Attunements shouldn't do different things from one another. Our build should define what we do, and attunements should give us different tools to do this. If we specialize in DPS, all attunements need to help us to achieve that in some way. Our fire trait line shouldn't just improve fire, it should give offensive capabilities to all atunements, pushing us to rotate between all of them in order to maximize our DPS or react to different situations.Water would condi cleanse and provide some personnal healing, earth would focus on combo finishers, fire on raw damage and air on targetted disables.

And how is it drastically different from the current situation? In d/d I have water where I can condition cleanse (OH dagger 5) and heal yourself, while applying some soft-control condis on enemies close to me (another option to protect myself while my HP are at threatening levels) - and still do a little bit of damage while at it. In Earth I have blast combo finishers ( OH dagger 4 and 5), and I have crowd control tools both in Earth (4) and Air (5 and 3, to some extent). Could you elaborate, perhaps, as of now it seems you only unsatisfied with how Water works from damage-dealing perspective, and it's not clear what you see as an issue in other 3 attunements. And even if water is really that big of an issue on itself atm, why do we need to drastically change the whole profession? Why not bump the water weapon skills a bit and/or reshuffle/bump related traits in its (and perhaps other) spec lines?

What I want to say is not that Ele doesn't need some change, but that it don't need to be changed completely. Such kind of change seem to me much worse threat to the profession I enjoy playing than the current situation, as odds are high we all will get something nobody will enjoy anymore. So there needs to be pretty good reasons for such kind of change (specifically, any changes that involve complete re-shuffling/redesigning weapon skills), and I haven't so far seen ones I can consider as such, sorry. The last thing I would like to see are completely redesigned are weapon skills everybody is already accustomed to, even worse - simplified and dumbed down for an average Joe. As long as it's just some multipliers' changes and addition of a few useful effects/fields to certain skills, it's okay - but nothing more radical than this. Same goes for all core utility skills. Ideally, all changes should be limited to specializations alone.

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@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@ROMANG.1903 said:I am sorry but no, I think ele does need a drastic change. You can't make a profession that does a little bit of everything while forcing them to be super specialized in a single attunement and having others classes with more defined roles. An elementalist that does a little bit of everything will never replace a druid in a group. And when you already have a druid, why would you want a tiny bit more healing from the elementalist?

Mb because druid can mess it up/occur to be not very well familiar with how to play druid/too drunk or lazy/just get affected by a network lag and screw it up? Why is it bad to have a back up healer which can also bring in a lot of punch potential? That niche role works quite well for Zenyatta and Lucio in Overwatch, for example. Also, must note that what I'll be saying below is said from a perspective of someone who plays Openworld PvE mostly, and uses d/d as weapons exclusively (for the life of mine I couldn't make myself to lie staff or scepeter/focus, they seem so dull and slow, and "laggy" when compared to d/d mobility and thrill of jumping into close combat and wrecking havoc with Churning earth and Air and FGS :) )

Yes, you can object, saying that in an ideal group there will always be most qualified people that train day and night together and can be 100% sure about their performance as a collective - but what percentage of the real in-game "group adventures" does those done by close to ideal groups who got their hands on a specialized and highly-trained druid in all their runs does constitute? Note I'm using a general term "group adventures" here which includes (but is not limited to) any kind of ad-hoc collective escapade, from some randomly assembled party of strangers roaming maps in open world pve to low-level raids and fractals to casual roams in WvW by some guld members who don't specialize in it. I have strong suspicion your argument will only stand for niche hard-core communities constituting a very small percentage of GW2 players, and most of groups could still will benefit from a backup healer. I personally use Water a lot in open-world pve, both for self-sustain (to heal myself in a battle which took too long for me to burn through my HP to a threatening levels) and to assist people who happened to be around.But we are not in Overwatch, and I rarely have a druid who can't handle their group without help. And these usually learn to do so over time, so is turning the elementalist into a class that only works at lower skill levels really what you want?

@ROMANG.1903 said:That's why we need to be specialized. Attunements shouldn't do different things from one another. Our build should define what we do, and attunements should give us different tools to do this. If we specialize in DPS, all attunements need to help us to achieve that in some way. Our fire trait line shouldn't just improve fire, it should give offensive capabilities to all atunements, pushing us to rotate between all of them in order to maximize our DPS or react to different situations.Water would condi cleanse and provide some personnal healing, earth would focus on combo finishers, fire on raw damage and air on targetted disables.

And how is it drastically different from the current situation? In d/d I have water where I can condition cleanse and heal yourself, while applying some soft-control condis on enemies close to me (another option to protect myself while my HP are at threatening levels) - and still do a little bit of damage while at it. In Earth I have blast combo finishers ( d/d 4 and 5), and I have crowd control tools both in Earth (4) and Air (5 and 3, to some extent). Could you elaborate, perhaps, as of now it seems you only unsatisfied with how Water works from damage-dealing perspective, and it's not clear what you see as an issue in other 3 attunements. And even if water is really that big of an issue on itself atm, why do we need to drastically change the whole profession? Why not bump the water weapon skills a bit and reshuffle/bump related traits in its (and perhaps other) spec lines?You ignored the rest of my post.What I want to say is not that Ele doesn't need some change, but that it don't need to be changed completely. Such kind of change seem to me much worse threat to the profession I enjoy playing than the current situation, as odds are high we all will get
something
nobody will enjoy anymore. So there needs to be pretty good reason for such kind of change (specifically, any changes that involve complete re-shuffling/redesigning of weapon skills), and I haven't so far seen ones I can consider as such, sorry. The last thing I would like to see completely redesigned are weapon skills everybody is already accustomed to. As long as it's just some multiplies changes and adding of a few useful effects/fields it's okay, but nothing more radical than this. Same goes for all core utility skills. Ideally, all changes should be limited to specializations alone.

Some weapon skills should go. Lightning strike on scepter offers nothing interesting, it's just something you must spam. Merging that damage into the auto attack would open up for a new interesting skill... All aura weapon skills need to be replaced, because they offer nothing interesting. What would be interesting for example is to have to do the work ourselves, to place combos and finishers in order to get a specific auras, and auras should be buffed in consequence.

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My brief list of how we could make Ele better without any radical risky things (mostly repeating ideas mentioned by others anyway):

  1. Buff to auras, they are of no use atm, offer nothing what would be worth of specifically trying to bestow them to your teammates, they are too short-living and insignificant
  2. Changes to how conjures work. First of all, make them function as a Glypgh, so that all your 4 basic conjures would take a single utility slot and you can choose the one you need by switching attainments - I actually have no idea why it's not like that from the start, as it goes extremely well with the general vibe of this profession (an endless versatility and tons of options, at any time, at a cost of more complex management). Then, also move away from them being just a bundle which replaces your weapon skills and won't allow you to access them until dropped. I would go with something like conjured weapon being a swappable weapon, so after using few skills of it you need, you could just swap it away, getting access to your basic skills again - and then swap to conjured weapon again when it's recharged by using the regular swap weapon hotkey - until it lasts. Conjured weapon should still be dropped on the ground as they do now, but just for other players if they will want to use it, it will still work as a bundle for them, lasting 30 seconds; Ele themselves won't need it, the weapon they will get will last full 60 seconds. The skill used to conjure should recharge in 30 seconds, instead of 1 minute currently; if a new weapon is conjured before previous has expired, it will substitute it - so, ele could, for example, "pre-conjure" the Shield or the Bow, use a couple of skills, swap them away as warrior or thief can do with their second set of weapons, and continue with their rotation - and then when they need it again, they could just swap them back and use, then swap them away again - repeat until its lifetime ends.
  3. At least the Shield needs some rework to be of use. Here are 2 ideas: 1st, allow to use utility spells while blocking with its skill number 2 - this way you could set a block and heal yourself at the same time, or, instead, block and immediately use Signet (of fire), like a RL soldier with and assault shield, firing their gun from behind of it :) 2nd, that block skill must become easy to cancel (atm you can cancel with Ecs key, and you can't even reassign it), like, in Action Camera mode it should be cancellable by hitting RMB; moreover, when cancelled this way, if it has been channeled just for about second or two, it must get reduced cooldown. This way Ele will be able to play with this great block ability in subtle ways, easily engaging into blocking mode, and disengaging from it, and casting defensively from behind the shield - bring pretty interesting possibilities at least for solo or casual group pve runs.
  4. Light to moderate changes to existing specs. Not sure which changes actually should be done. Others may have better ideas. Or, alternatively, a totally different aproach (next item)
  5. As we still have to choose 2 out of 5 possible elemental specs to use 3 elemental specializations will always be left behind and will be much less effective than those we choose to specialize upon. To make up for this, some new mechanic could be added which provides an interesting gaming mechanic which would allow you to use them in an effective way. Both mechanics assume a new key will be defined, in addition to 4 attunement switching keys and will be triggering new special abilities for Tempest and Weaver. They are described in details below.
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So, now on ot a bit more radical and risky changes :) Still won't change the core abilities, but instead will add new mechanics making up for the need of using non-specced / non-dps elements sometimes with unique abilities helping the whole team a lot (if executed well)

Weaver

  1. A new bar is shown in the HUD. This bar fills steadily but slowly if you camp only elements you chose to spec into, but when you use a few skills of element you didn't spec (or any double-skill partly based on such element), bar fills for a much larger amount. This only works when you use such skill with an actual effect (healing some hp, inflicting damage or status etc), no use in simply discharging it without target or cause, so it can't be easily "farmed", you need to actually diversify to charge it faster
  2. There is a mark over its middle, and when if fills to this mark, you now may use the new key to release this accumulated mixed energy. You still may decide to accumulate more, for a much greater effect, but beware, as starting from this point any damage you suffer from any source will result in surges in speed this bar fills with, in addition to factors mentioned in the previous item, and if you'll miss the moment and will allow it to reach 100% it will instead explode at your position, delivering you a devastating blow and shutting down 2 of your random attunements for twice as long as attunement switch does. In PvP your enemies will see an indicator above your head, or some kind of halo, telling them you are over 50% and hitting you hard now may make you explode :)
  3. Hitting the release key before the bar will fill to 50% will just dispose part of this energy safely (15% per key hit); you can hit the key repeatedly to drop it to 0% if you wish
  4. Now, the most interesting part. On release, you shoot a destabilizing beam aiming it at one of friendlies around who has a condition on them. When it hits them, it "knocks out" this condition from them, which then turns into a destabilizing ray itself, flying out from the friendly roughly into the same direction as original beam did (with a bit of randomness added) - while original beam keeps flying as well, though also slightly deviated from original direction; if any of those hits (or comes by close enough to) another ally with a condi on them, it again "knocks it out" from them. Yes, exactly as in nuclear chain reaction, it keeps multiplying and cascading, cleansing friendlies from conditions the deeper it goes into a crowd. There could be also a cap on how many times it can multiply, which could be tied to how much charge you accumulated before releasing it
  5. ..but it doesn't end here :) After passing through friendlies, all those beams (hopefully) fly through your enemies' ranks as well, granting them (randomly) those conditions they "knocked out" from friendlies; if it hits an enemy, it is inhibited by them, and then this condition may stick to them
  6. The chance it will stick to an enemy depends on both how charged you was at release moment, and also on purity of the energy you gathered. Purity is shown on the bar itself, the more "murky" it is - the worse. This not only defines the actual chance it will stick, but also the chance it will hit them - the "purer" it is, the wider is each such beam and the more precisely it fly towards an enemy (it's slightly homing at them). "Perfectly pure" would be an (unlikely) chance you maintained a perfect balance between elements you specced for and those for which you didn't; energy you got by being hit when bar is over 50% full (as described in item 1) will greatly purify your charge, making it much more potent. So, BDSM is your friend ;) An "ideally pure" charge released exactly at 99% will provide you 99% chance that any "condition ray" hitting an enemy will put it on them
  7. If you miss a friendly with initial beam, or there is no suitable condition effect on that guy, you've just wasted it as well.

So, in a nutshell, you are facing a seemingly simple decision of whether you'll try to gamble and will try to fill the bar more for a greater effect, or just release every time it reaches 50% for maximum safety, or may be just dump it for no effect (no positive, no negative) before it will rise over 50% by hitting release key repeatedly from time to time, or one time once in a while to keep it slightly below 50% so you could charge up and use it quickly when needed. Effect on release depends highly on timing and positioning, but if the original beam is issued from a right angle into a crowd of allies, it may cleanse them quite well, and then put those condis on your enemies as well.

This adds a whole new layer to a skilled play, especially as part of a team.

Tempest

  1. A very similar bar is displayed as well, and a "release key" is defined. Yet it uses a different mechanic to fill the charge. By using the release key initially, you can aim to an area on the ground and rip all negative conditions from friendlies in the area, and assign them to yourself; the ability will then go on cooldown for 10-15 seconds. You can cleanse condis you inhibited,or just walk it off, but in the end they still will leave a scar on you - there is a counter beside the bar which shows how much of condis you've accumulated this way
  2. Inhibiting condis does 2 things: it immediately charges the bar for a few percents per each, and them the higher the counter of inhibited condis is, the faster the bar will be charging; the only way to reset the counter is to make a successful release, from now on; most of considerations from Weaver's case apply, like, you must not overcharge, when you are above 50% human players will see it, and if you hit hard your bar may easily reach 100% and you'll explode; yet you can't dump energy by hitting the release button before it's reached 50% (another approach is used for this). The bar also stops charging you stop using weapon skills constantly and change attunements - so simply sitting there doing nothing waiting for a charge with extremely high counter won't do.
  3. In addition, the higher the counter is, the more is chance some of your weapon skills will randomly be marked as "shortcutted" to your "energy vault" and will be highlighted on the HUD. By hitting such skill you'll decrease charge of the bar significantly, and at the same time decrease the counter by one. The skills of elements you're specced for will more likely to become "shortcutted". Thus if you decide to rip off more condies from friendlies and faster charge your bar, you will need to pay more attention which skills you can use in your rotations while you are in specced attunements, up to the point when you may even have to camp your non-specced attunements for some time, as the specced ones will become "polluted" and too tricky to use without decreasing your charge and inhibitted condi counter
  4. When above 50%, you may release accumulated energy as a wide powerful beam stretching 1500 units. It heals allies and puts protection on them, while damages enemies and puts vulnerability on them. Its power depends on its purity again, but this time it's defined by how high your inhibited condi counter was at the moment of release and for how long you managed to keep that counter that high before you released . "Ideal purity" is when it was so high that all your specced elements' skills were become shortcutted, and you had to camp non-specced elements, and it become like that very soon after the counter initially switched from 0 to 1

In a nutshell, you as Tempest you can deliberately rip off condis from friendlies, and put them on yourself. That will increase your "inhibitted condi counter", and the higher it is, the faster you charge the bar. But the higher it is, the more is chance some of your skills (first of all, the ones belonging to elements you specced) will be marked as "shortcutted", and using them will decrease the counter and the charge of the bar. So you need to balance between faster charging which is tricky to maintain, and slower but more reliable charging; between using usual rotations in specced elements and possibly decreasing the charge, or camping non-specced ones at high counter value to quickly charge it to the top. The final power of the released beam depends on how long you were able to maintain that high counter before release.

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The current state of elementalist is incredibly sad. They've had over a year since PoF released to make impactful fixes and nothing has improved at all, despite all of the changes that they have made and all of the nerfs that other professions have had. Anet need to start making changes that have actual impact.

Five changes with a bit of thought behind them could probably help ele about as much as all the balance patches in the last year combined.

  1. Elemental Bastion is now a water grandmaster trait. Powerful Auras has taken it's place as a tempest grandmaster trait.
  2. Woven Stride no longer grants regeneration when you gain superspeed or swiftness. Instead you now cleanse a condition when gaining superspeed or swiftness.
  3. Blinding Ashes cooldown has been reduced to 5 seconds. The cooldown is now separate for each target affected by burn.
  4. Overload Air, Overload Fire and Overload Water now have 1 stack of stability baseline.
  5. Lightning Flash cooldown has been reduced by 10 seconds and its range has been increased by 300.
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